GeForce GTS 450 vs Radeon HD 5850

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon HD 5850, which uses a 40 nm design. AMD has clocked the core speed at 725 MHz. The GDDR5 memory runs at a frequency of 1000 MHz on this card. It features 1440(288x5) SPUs as well as 72 Texture Address Units and 32 Rasterization Operator Units.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GTS 450		106 Watts
Radeon HD 5850		151 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (42%)

Memory Bandwidth

As far as performance goes, the Radeon HD 5850 should theoretically be quite a bit better than the GeForce GTS 450 in general. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		128000 MB/sec
GeForce GTS 450		57728 MB/sec
	Difference: 70272 (122%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon HD 5850 will be much (more or less 108%) more effective at texture filtering than the GeForce GTS 450. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		52200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce GTS 450		25056 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 27144 (108%)

Pixel Rate

If running with a high resolution is important to you, then the Radeon HD 5850 is superior to the GeForce GTS 450, by a large margin. (explain)

Radeon HD 5850		23200 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GTS 450		12528 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 10672 (85%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in MB per second) that can be moved across the external memory interface in a second. The number is worked out by multiplying the bus width by its memory clock speed. In the case of DDR type RAM, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the bandwidth is, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum amount of texture map elements (texels) that are processed per second. This number is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units by the core speed of the chip. The better the texel rate, the better the video card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in one second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics card could possibly record to its local memory in a second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The number is worked out by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate also depends on lots of other factors, most notably the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.